106 people are competing for every apprenticeship opening. That's not a demand problem

106 people are competing for every apprenticeship opening across UK trades right now. In electrical, it's 227.

That's not a demand problem. It's a capacity problem built into the model itself.

Apprenticeships run on one structure: an employer creates a seat, funds it, and picks one candidate out of the applicant pool. No separate route in if you're not the one chosen. No modular path.

Apprenticeship starts overall are already down by around 170,000 a year compared to a decade ago. Fewer seats, more people trying to get into them.

That structure was designed for a specific person: a 16-year-old leaving school with one shot at one seat, no other commitments, no existing skills to draw on. It was never built to also serve someone switching careers at 40 who already has the discipline, client-facing experience, and work ethic a trade actually needs.

The bottleneck doesn't care what a person would bring to the role. A former project manager and a school leaver are competing for the exact same single seat, filtered by the exact same single employer.

The problem was never that people don't want the trades. It's that the only formal route in wasn't built to let enough people through, at any age.

If you've tried to get into a trade and hit this wall, what happened?